“Insects as Others”by Lucy Davis

​Lee Wen awoke one morning to find himself transformed into an “artist of the people”

When he lifted his head he could see his arms, in his civil servant’s crisp white shirt, pinned down by two stiff, blank wing-like canvases. Then, two inscriptions miraculously appeared, one on each canvas: “Is Art Necessary?” and “What is Art For?”

Two sequential videos, Is Art Necessary?/What is Art Good For?––filmed by Heman Chong; written and performed by Lee Wen––were part of the latter’s solo exhibition “Everybody should be happy” (Utterly Art, 14-24 November 2002). The first follows Lee Wen as “born-again artist of the people”, from his traumatic awakening, through a tour around Singapore. “Wings” aloft, he fluctuates between desperate attempts to escape his condition and experimenting with its possibilities. He painstakingly scrambles up a pile of rubble, tries to fly, strides down a suburban street like the best of doomsday prophets, then traverses a subterranean shopping mall as if driven towards The Esplanade, Singapore’s new over-600-million-(SGD)-dollar art centre. Once there, the artist collapses on his knees, wings still straining upwards. In the second video he flaps ineffectively around the Esplanade grounds earnestly trying to get passersby to respond to the writing on his “wings”. Typically, Lee Wen’s performances contain a dangerous ambivalence. His embrace of popular ideological positions is at once playful and deeply earnest. One is never sure whether or not he’s for real.

Writing this review in the wake of SARS, the popular anxieties surrounding the epidemic ineluctably infect a reading of Lee Wen’s take on Metamorphosis. In SARS the government has found a new impetus for its continual obsession with hygiene. Just as new terrorist threats sustain legitimacy for the Internal Security Act (ISA)––which sanctions detention without trial for two-year (renewable) terms––similarly, because of SARS, in housing estates, malls and coffee shops island-wide, armies of zealous cleaners are mounting an all-out “war” against bacteria, roaches, rats, stray cats and dogs.

This obsession with hygiene has been historically transferred to every arena of Singapore life: from “killer litter” campaigns to official racial identifications to education and housing policies. It is a logic that is highly-interpellative; boundaries between groups of artists are analogously maintained and meticulously sanitised. Some artists endeavour, for example, to distance themselves from charges of “elitism”. Labels such as “too cheem!” are used to denigrate practices not easily understood by your “Ah Peck” man on the street. There is much ritualistic self-flagellation about art not reaching “the heartlands” (public estates housing 80% of the population).

In previous incarnations, Lee Wen’s has earnestly embodied the marginal artist as anthropological fetish. In this latest metamorphosis he is angst-ridden and crucified, trying to transcend his torment and contact “the real people”.­­

But in his performances there is often also an obscene subtext––both repulsive and compulsive. As “most yellow of all”, his Yellow Man has given out vials of his “essence” in the form of used, yellowed bath water. As “most marginal of all”––a crudely-daubed “Black Man”––he once distributed heart-shaped chocolates, with an aftertaste of sin and shit. In these latest videos, echoing Kafka, the humble insect is recast as Christ––the “most benevolent of all”, come to seek what art “the people” really want. But under the spotless white shirt of the anxiously proselytising artist, twitch the feelers of that “most repulsive of all”.

“Insects as Others” is unpublished todate and was originally commissioned and written for Art Asia Pacific magazine to be released in May 2003.